When I got home from work last night and was pulling into a parking space the lady from downstairs was on the sidewalk walking stupid dog.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t contemplate “accidentally” gunning the engine, jumping the curb, and turning the little bastard into a nothing more than a stain.
Of course I didn’t do that and instead returned the lady’s friendly wave.
Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the lender my realtor likes to work with to see if it’s even remotely possible for me to get a loan that I can afford to pay on the house I want to buy.
At the very least I’ll get an idea of what I can afford if it’s not possible, and will have a better idea of what to look for in terms of potential housing.
My weekend at work was largely uneventful. The only noteworthy thing that happened was the loss of my insulated company logo mug – which no longer has the company logo on it, as it wore off some time ago. It was the old logo anyway.
In any case, the mug had faithfully served all of my water holding needs for years, until that fateful day last week when I left it on the sink in the locker room when I stopped to use the facilities on my way out to my car at the end of the day.
I didn’t notice that it wasn’t in my car until Wednesday morning when I went to take it out so that I could transfer it to the loaner that I thought I was going to be using, and I forgot to look for it when I went in for training Wednesday afternoon.
On Thursday morning I was looking around for it, and was checking the cabinet in the break room where people keep their mugs when someone mentioned seeing one on the sink in the locker room the day before. That’s precisely where I thought I’d left it, so I went in to check. Alas, it wasn’t there, though there was someone in the locker room who confirmed that it had been sitting there all week.
I checked with security to see if anyone had brought it to them for lost and found, but no one had.
So I sadly accepted the fact that my mug was well and truly gone.
And then grabbed one from the cabinet that didn’t have a name on it, washed it out, and claimed it as my own.
What, I was supposed to mourn for a mug?
And that was pretty much the extent of my excitement at work over the weekend.
Last night marked the season premiere of Property Ladder on TLC.
(Quick side note: remember when I did my entry about cable networks and mentioned TLC’s obsession with little people and suggested that they might end up sending the little people to Miami to get tattoos? Well, on the ads for the next episode of Miami Ink, guess what I saw? A little person getting a tattoo. Sure, it’s not someone from the actual little people show, but it’s still kind of an eerie coincidence.)
If you’ve never seen the show, it’s essentially yet another house flipping show, though it focuses primarily on people who are trying the whole house flipping thing for the first time and really have no idea what they’re doing. As a consequence, there can be some severe train wreck episodes in which you see people burying themselves in debt, marriages collapsing due to the various pressures, and quite frequently things just don’t end happily.
Quite honestly, it’s a little painful and kind of depressing to watch.
As sort of a twist, at the beginning of the show the host, a real estate expert, consults with the would-be flippers, listening to their plans and offering suggestions – and criticism – in an effort to help make sure that their budgets and schedules are realistic and to try to get them to maximize the payoff for their efforts.
Sometimes they listen to her. Most of the time they don’t. When they do, things generally work out better for them. When they don’t, well, like I said: train wrecks.
She shows up at various points in the process to see how they’re doing, and, without doing so in so may words, say, “I told you so,” as they tell her about how not taking her advice made them blow their budgets and their timelines.
Now, to be honest, the host is the primary reason I watch the show because she’s hot...yet ice cold.
Her name is Kirsten Kemp, and she is a tall cold glass of ice water. She tries to come of as warm, always hugging everyone and smiling, but she’s not fooling anyone: that is one frosty bitch.
Think Martha Stewart, only younger, and sexy, and with a kick-ass rack.
Kirsten is all passive-aggressive cocked eyebrows and barely-restrained contempt.
(I like to call her Kirsten Contempt.)
She would not look out of place with a riding crop in her hand.
Oh sure, she’s supposedly trying to help people and looking out for their best interests, but you know she doesn’t want them to listen. She wants them to fail so that she can lord it over them. If she could get away with it, she’d be wearing spiked heels and using them to grind the failed flippers’ faces into the cheap-ass laminate floors that they put in despite her insistence that high-end requires real wood.
And I have to say, she gives me real wood.
Let me tell you, I would love to have her look at me like I’m a retard when I tell her my too-aggressive asking price, or raise that eyebrow contemptuously…right before I make that ice queen melt into a puddle.
(Or file a restraining order.)
The only problem with Property Ladder is that we really don’t get to see enough of Kirsten (in more ways than one). She shows up at the beginning to give her advice, stops by somewhere in the middle to check the progress, and then comes in at the end to see how things turned out and to try one last time to talk some sense into them (and, as mentioned, say “I told you so.”).
All told, we get maybe ten minutes’ worth of Kirsten.
Still, there are other reasons to watch the show. In general, I like to see the whole “before and after” aspect of house flipping shows, and I’m interested in seeing some of the design ideas people come up with.
And though there are often train wrecks, I generally do hope that things will work out for them and I hate to see them fail, especially when they work really hard at it but just can’t seem to catch a break.
(Like the cute girl whose cabinet doors were stolen by the guy she’d hired to resurface them for her, though in the end things worked out and she actually sold her place for more than her asking price. Of course, things worked out for her, I think, just because she was so cute. I’ll bet the person who bought the place was a guy and he did it hoping that she’d go out with him. Seriously, she was a hot bartender who got most of her labor done for her by her male regulars from the bar.)
I generally don’t have that much sympathy for the people who totally and willfully ignore Mistress Kirsten’s commands…I mean, Kirsten’s advice, in part because they tend to be kind of stupid and make really, really idiotic decisions, but mostly because she’s just so hot when she’s smug and delivering well-deserved punishment, and it just makes me want her to tell me that I’m bad and that I need a spanking.
*Sigh*
They seriously need to put her in fishnets and leather.
In any case, if you’re into house flipping shows – or hot blonde pseudo-dominatrixes – you should definitely check it out. It’s on Saturdays at 8 Eastern on TLC.
That’s all I have for now. I’ll likely be posting a special Jack T. Chick-centric entry within the next couple of days, so you have that to look forward to (or to avoid).
(In the interest of fairness, I should note that I have no doubt that in real life Kirsten is a very nice and genuinely warm person, and I have no real basis for believing that the heft of a cat o’ nine tails would feel comfortable in her hand. I will say, though, that I have no doubt that she would look amazing in a corset and thigh-high boots with stiletto heels.)
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